“All my work is about how it feels to look.”
“When Photoshop came around, I thought I’d died and went to heaven. When I hear artists say, ‘Oh, the good old days’ or ‘I’m old school,’ I just want to puke. There’s no tool I won’t use.”
“I don’t follow anybody. I just flip through whatever Instagram sends me. I like to keep my algorithm pure, so I only ever like pictures of art. It’s a rabbit hole for me because I’m a total voyeur.”
“Success can be destructive to the creative process. I say it all the time: success is as dangerous as total failure.”
“If you really have something to say, sooner or later it will be heard. And if you’re lucky you’ll still be alive.”
“I work in a studio with lots of young people, most of whom are my former students. We delight in trading YouTube videos! We all stop working to watch them. I’m totally addicted to anything with kittens and puppies, but ‘Very Scared Kid’ is one of my favorites.”
“I love the idea of making images of the parts of the body that we all have but that no one pays attention to, like the soft area underneath your nose.”
“I think there’s still this huge glass ceiling for women owning sexuality. And especially young women. If you’re an old lady like me, I can do anything now.”
“The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart – so I’m about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.”
“I like working with women who own their own power.”
“The fashion world tells me how much they love my work, but they don’t hire me very often. Tom Ford did, and he hated it. Naturally, he wanted to Photoshop away the imperfections, which is perfectly understandable. They want their vision.”
Text by Nadja Sayej
Images via Artnet
